China Is On an Epic Solar Power Binge (technologyreview.com) 191
An anonymous reader links to an article on MIT Technology Review: It's worth taking a minute to appreciate the sheer scale of what China is doing in solar right now. In 2015, the country added more than 15 gigawatts of new solar capacity, surpassing Germany as the world's largest solar power market. China now has 43.2 gigawatts of solar capacity, compared with38.4 gigawatts in Germany and 27.8 in the United States. According to new projections, it seems that trend is going to continue. Under its 13th Five Year Plan, China will nearly triple solar capacity by 2020, adding 15 to 20 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for the next five years, according to Nur Bekri, director of the National Energy Administration. That will bring the country's installed solar power to more than 140 gigawatts. To put that in context, world solar capacity topped 200 gigawatts last year and is expected to reach 321 gigawatts by the end of 2016.
That's nice (Score:3, Insightful)
What's that in percentage of total eletric power?
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Good question. I also know that China is an an 'epic': Coal power binge, Gas power binge, nuclear power binge, hydro power binge, etc...
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If they binge on solar, so much the better. It may not generate as much energy as other items per area of land covered, but upkeep on solar generation is very low, and the ecological impact is relatively minor compared to burning fossil fuels. Their use of the technology will get them to make it better, which benefits everyone.
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Well, let me offer a counter point (as someone who knows nothing about China based on what we see in the news) ...
Widespread corruption and skirting of environmental laws will make a hell of a mess as people get swindled or they wreck their environment even further.
The pattern seems to be that someone gets rich, a lot of other someones die or have their town ruined, and then the show trial comes in to try to make it look li
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You can't replace coke with electricity. Learn how steel is made.
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Electric arc furnaces are used to recycle steel all the time rather than using coke for it.
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They're building lots of new infrastructure. Demand can't be met purely via steel melting.
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One can melt an enormous amount of steel with 140 GW of power.
Re:That's nice (Score:5, Funny)
It's nearly 36 Mr. Fusions.
Re:That's nice (Score:5, Informative)
One reference claims China consumed 5130 billion kilowatt hours in 2014 [eia.gov]. Which is a really stupid way of saying terawatt hours. Divided by time, that is roughly 585 gigawatts continuous energy drain in 2014.
So, 20/585 (assuming no increase in demand, ever) comes out to slightly over 3%.
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You misread the article. The 20 GW figure was for a current annual increase in solar, not the total current amount of solar power.
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See http://www.reuters.com/article... [reuters.com]
The consume 5550000000000000 kWh, which is 5550000000 GWh. So... either my calculations are off, I misinterpreted something, or it's just a drop on a hot plate.
Given the well-known air pollution in China. . . (Score:2)
Re:Given the well-known air pollution in China. . (Score:4, Interesting)
If a given city is so polluted that it's cutting solar efficiency; that's a good sign that the people there probably aren't happy about it. It'll involve a bunch of shuffling around of the grid; but you would likely make people considerably happier if you can shut down the worst pollution sources, tide yourself over with power from elsewhere on the grid, and then get increasing amounts of local solar as the worst of the smog eventually settles out or blows away.
Title case is stupid (Score:2, Offtopic)
China Is On an Epic Solar Power Binge
Poor "an." Why doesn't "an" get a capital letter?
Of course the real question is why all the other words do, when No-one Ever Writes Anything Else Like This.
Re:Title case is stupid (Score:4, Funny)
Look, if you're going to work on re-writing the rules of standard English, do you think you could start on the quoting rules? Trailing punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it's not part of the quote? Who ever came up with that? And anyway, English title casing rules are easy to deal with... https://metacpan.org/pod/Text:... [metacpan.org]
Right. On the internet WE ALL TALK LIKE THIS.
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Look, if you're going to work on re-writing the rules of standard English, do you think you could start on the quoting rules? Trailing punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it's not aripart of the quote? Who ever came up with that?
Some of us are.
Unlike some languages (such as French), which have centralized regulatory authorities, English is a language defined by its usage. Academics either track how it's used or (in some cases) try to impose their ideas, or define their regional dialect as "correct"
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Not at all. They're extremely useful for identifying acronyms, initialisms and proper nouns. And, yes, the beginnings of sentences.
What they're not useful for is being arbitrarily stuck on every word just because that's how newspapers used to do it.
(and no, just because you can find a set of rules, that doesn't make it any less arbitrary)
Actually, China is ramping up wind and solar (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot of people's supply chains have been disrupted, because China is modernizing, building industrial scale solar and wind nationwide, and took all their coal plants offline to convert those they could to cogeneration.
Which is a good thing.
But it has meant they have reduced use of steel and coal dramatically.
Many modern universities and entire cities on the coasts of the US and Canada now require all new construction be built with either super efficient HVAC or with load-bearing roofs and electrical system
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No, this is an excellent idea. The job creation tends to be in local maintenance (wind) and installation (solar). And, both solar and wind are now cheaper in most of the US and Canada. Fossil fuels really are on their way out. Adapt.
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The majority cost in every product is labour. You are stating that there are more labor costs in solar and wind than in other. Then saying it is cheaper. It can't be cheaper and require more labour. That is why its a terrible idea. Indeed even Obama said it would cost more when he famously said that your electric bill would go up under his plan.
I see you've never been to China.
Actually, for any large scale energy project, the majority cost is actually permitting and hearings. If you worked in the industry, or had any idea how difficult it is to site energy transmission lines, or build things, you'd know that.
But keep living in your 18th Century fossil fuel fantasy. We'll be here in the 21st Century, building things.
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I think there can be no greater irony than citing an Austrian School economist to call somebody else ignorant.
A school of economics that is so heterodox it's effectively ignore. That is completely anti-empiricism and thus refuses to improve or adjust it's views in line with empirical data or results, yet persists in making predictions about the real world and when they invariably fail to come true never corrects it's theories - instead suddenly remembering that "empiricism" is somehow bad. A schools of eco
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That productivity should be going elsewhere.
First question: why? Who are you to define where "productivity" should go to?
Second question: to where? If you have ideas where people can get jobs: why are you not providing the jobs, or the ideas at least?
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Wow, and why is the market not absorbing all the unemployed that now work in wind and solar if your market works so good?
Thanks for the link.
Your fallacy is "calling to authority"!
Why? Because you bring a link that is off topic. How can you come to the stupid idea that subsidicings (does China even do that???) equal to the Broken Window Fallacy?
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Posting to kill an Underrated mod.
Is this to compete (Score:2, Interesting)
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Last announcement is the government is going to force the shutdown of about 30% of coal power plants (most of these are the dirtiest least efficient plants). This isn't a paper announcement either, as the government is under intense public pressure to deal with the air and water pollution. Their long range plan is to basically stop using coal power entirely (IIRC that's about 2050). They have more than 130 nuclear reactors under construction and are building so much solar PV and wind turbines it would make
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I think the logic is that they replace the old power plants with new ones and in this way concentrate coal usage. That means the pollution becomes more manageable. They also add scrubbers to the new plants.
I would take that 30% number with a grain of salt. They're not going to cut new power plants and the old ones are also smaller so it's not 30% of the energy production.
Also with the economic crunch they're going through I think the 'solar binge' should be taken with a grain of salt. And a slice of lemon a
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It's not so much the older ones, but the badly designed one. They have a LOT of coal plants that operate at about 30% because of all the coal plants they have. Scrubbers have also been mandatory on coal plants for about 10 years. Though it's mandatory to install scrubbers, it is not mandatory to actually run them and as far as I'm aware this hasn't changed though likely will in the near future.
The 30% number is significant, they've already announced that nearly 1.8million jobs in coal mining and coal power
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First off, the old plants that are retiring are a fraction of the SIZE and NUMBER. They retire 1 every month OR 2.
Secondly, their load capacity is over 50%. The table shows that 2014 capacity was 907 GW, with production of 3959,000 twh. If you assume that the number for plants was around 850 gw (907 was 2014, not 2013), then you have an average capacity of 52%. [wikipedia.org]
AND only a FEW are ran at 30%. These are the ones in which the gov built at what are now ghost cities. The vast majority of China's coa
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Adjusted Per Capita (Score:3)
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Germany>USA>China
uber alles...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . Slashdot wants more characters per line before it will
Dear Summary, (Score:2)
now divide by 4 (Score:2)
divide those numbers by about four to compare to the world's combined nuclear capacity of 384GW. or coal's 1500+MW.
I'm actually for paving over desert with solar panels and storage systems and UHVDC to carry it around continents, could actually power the world. But this piecemeal approach isn't aggressive enough
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ha that coal number should have GW not MW after it of course. 1.5 terrawatts!
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My phrase "paving the desert" was metaphorical only, the energy needs of the U.S. could in fact be met by less than 100 square miles of solar panel in Nevada. So "paving over the area of a city (Milwaukee WI specifically, 97 Sq Mi) in the Nevada desert", how about that?
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how about that?
No that's not even close. If you show me your math, I'll show you where you're wrong. Remember, per capita energy use in the US is 250kwh per day. This includes embodied energies and transportation costs which without showing your math I'm assuming you forgot to factor in.
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10 TW-hours of energy per year in the USA used(delivered not production which has losses like steam->electricity). One square meter of solar panel makes 1KW-hour of electricity per day if 20% efficient and the average 5 hours sun. 100 square miles is 2.6E8 square meters. So each day those solar panels make 2.6E8 KW-hours or 2.6E11 W-hours. Per year they make 365 * 2.6E11 = 9.5TW-hours
The Reason is not what you think (Score:3)
The raw material for solar panels is polycrystalline silicon. Due to increases in oil prices, subsidies for solar panels in Europe and elsewhere, the price of polysilicon spiked tenfold from $50/kg in 2005, to $475/kg in early 2008.
China went on a crash building binge, in an attempt to capture the business and drive out non-Chinese competitors. They were too successful, and together with the world recession of that time (lower oil prices and end of subsidies), collapsed the price to $16/kg by $2012.
What to do with the surplus they could no longer export? Why, PV the heck out of their own country and hopefully put a lid on pollution. Ironically, polysilicon production is hugely energy-intensive, so that each production facility pretty much needs a corresponding (coal-fired) power plant.
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It does not have to be coal-powered. But the power demand is continuous, 24/7. Also cheap, to be competitive, as power is a large percentage of the product cost.
However, newer production technologies are now reducing energy consumption significantly, but this does not help plants already in operation.
Economics as much Ecology. (Score:2)
Thus by looking at the big picture it is sensible for a country to spend quite a bit more on a p
Albedo management. (Score:2)
Unlike the surfaces over which they are typically erected (such as sand or light-colored roofs), which bounce a lot of the sun's input back into space through the "visible-light window" of atmospheric transmission, solar panels absorb pretty much all the light that strikes them. Less than a third is converted into electricity and the remaining more than two-thirds ends up being re-radiated as infrared, which generally doesn't make it back out.
Were you worried about a greenhouse effect boost from carbon dio
Easements are easy (Score:2)
And Environment Impact is the sound of a rifle butt cracking a skull.
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Re:How do I read this? (Score:5, Informative)
Panels are usually rated in Wp (peak wattage), which is an instantaneous reading taken under optimal conditions (of both light and temperature).
Typical top-end panels pump out about 240-260 Wp - call it 250Wp. This means you'd need four top-end monocrystal solar panels to get 1 kWp, 4,000 of them to get 1 MWp, etc.
Mind the "peak" portion though - typical daylight production is averaged to something like 50-60% of peak (to account for stuff like clouds, the sun not being perfectly perpendicular to the usually-fixed panel, high temperature degradations, etc.) This means that you usually have to overbuild by at least 40-50%...
TL;DR - that's a real big frigload of panels that they're looking to build and install.
Re:How do I read this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Might sound like a lot of panels but it's not really. If you put panels on every roof in the US we'd be producing more than 10 times the total power we need and the peak production would be far beyond anything anyone could consume. We only need to cover something like half the roofs in the US to generate more power that we'd need for decades.
It's not very far from there to methods to use that power to store it so it can be used outside production hours and there are a LOT of ways to store energy. Power shifting becomes very cheap when the peak power rate is zero.
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Well gosh, you could just lift a weight up with an electric motor and store electricity that way. Let it drop and generate your power. See, the thing you missed was, when somebody else said something kinda like what you said, you know, the person whose idea you're copying... they were probably talking about price. But see, if the thought experiment is that you have 10x the total power, well cost doesn't matter in the same way. Now, even at 15% storage efficiency using something like rocks, it works out.
Stor
Re:How do I read this? (Score:5, Informative)
It's peak power rating, as most plants are rated for. To get the average power generation rate you have to multiply by the capacity factor. For fixed tilt, industrial solar in a good location you may get upwards of 25% capacity, but don't expect better than that. Heliostats improve that figure. Random rooftop installations or solar in less than optimal regions yield significantly reduced capacity factors.
I assume this is mostly industrial scale fixed-tilt in as good of locations as China has (China is pretty bright, but not as bright as the US desert southwest). I'd wager they get about 20% capacity factor.
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24% is typical [cap-az.com] for fixed-tilt commercial plants in the the US desert southwest.
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And the US desert southwest is about as good as it gets.
Much of central and western China gets as much sun as the American SW, and the sun is often brighter because of the higher altitude.
Here is a map [wiki-solar.org] of where China's solar plants are actually located. Most of them are sited where the people are, rather than in the sunniest locations.
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Not really [solafuture.co.za]. The desert southwest is good, but there are places that are better. You can see why for example Europe really wants to use the Sahara as a power plant. Which would be win-win for everyone (well, except Russia)
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"You can see why for example Europe really wants to use the Sahara as a power plant."
So that once again, Europe will be critically dependent on the Middle East for its energy.
To put this in context (Score:2)
A typical nuclear plant produces 1GW (typical range: 0.5GW to 5GW). Last time I looked, been a while, I think the estimate was china needed more than 10 new nuke plants per year for sustained growth. So in context this is an enormous advance. Of course that's not 24/7 power. But with enough excess capacity they could even pump water upstream of the Dams or desalinate water.
the unit of measure here is power not energy. it's not a battery.
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desalinate water
In China?
And that is supposed to make sense, why?
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China doesn't need more 24/7 power. They need peak daytime power, that's what they're running out of.
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TW is power, not energy.
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Yes, I genuinely would find it more comprehensible. Because energy and power are not the same thing at all. You cannot measure energy in watts, no way, no how. Something can be high power, low energy, or low power, high energy; they are very, very different.
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Using wrong units to describe things does not make anything clearer, and yes we can estimate total energy use and routinely do, if imperfectly, including such things as 'daylight lighting services from the sun'. Look at for example DUKES (Digest of UK Energy Statistics) published yearly.
It's not pedantry to ask people to use art terms correctly and pay attention to the laws of physics even if it bored them at school since the laws are still there.
Rgds
Damon
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and yes we can estimate total energy use and routinely do
No, we can't, because we don't know for how long our civilization is going to exist. How's that for pedantry, pedant?
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And electricity is about 23% of the consumed energy.
So 0,6% of energy is about 2,6% of global electrical consumption.
So, 5 years from now, solar electricity from china will represent approx. 25% of global electricity production. Nuke is at 10% today, and falling.
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Except that
1) China is not planning to provide power for planet earth, just for China - so you need to compare with China's energy demands, not the World's energy demands.
2) The 15GW is not the current capacity nor the intended end capacity, that's just how much more they want to add every year (and it's the bottom of the scale).
So to put it in actual perspective - if 15-20 up to 321 is enough for fully 1/7th of the world's population, then every other country could invest a tiny fraction of that and go ful
Re:China is in the process of jarring... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's not much that could stop China's massive rate of solar installs. This isn't like a dam, where you can save pretty much all of a project cost by not building it. Solar these days is a very capital cost-dominated industry, if you count all manufacturing stages together. The factories are already built. They're not going to just idle them. If their rate of power demand growth drops as a result of their economic situation, it's going to be power projects involving resources that could be directed elsewhere that will be cut.
Even in this economic situation, though, China still is going to have serious demand for capacity growth.
It's interesting to see how much solar now looks like wind a decade ago. But that's a good thing. Up to a certain level of penetration (which we're nowhere close to), solar usually makes it easier on the grid, not harder, by reducing midday peaking requirements, particularly on the hottest days (if it's spread out enough, that is)
Re:China is in the process of jarring... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:China is in the process of jarring... (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. China's current situation isn't just a large environmental cost... it's also a large financial cost. Medical care, sick days and disability cost an economy serious money.
I'm sure China would love to be able to shut off a large chunk of their current hardware today. But they need more, not less. It's amazing the lengths they've gone to try to stretch what they have... for example, pumped hydro to let them shift daytime loads into the night. China has nearly half of the world's large pumped hydro stations, including two of the three largest. They really need daytime capacity.
Re:China is in the process of jarring... (Score:4, Interesting)
Your statement about penetration levels is seriously dated. What they've found in Germany and Hawaii and other places where solar is reaching 30% of power generation is that everything people assumed about maximum amount of solar energy is wrong. It was all theoretical anyway but what they find is that those peak generation periods you allow rates to fall to zero then people will jump in with storage technologies (batteries, fly wheels, pumped hydro, etc) and will use that free peak power to generate stored energy that the grid can use later. Recent research is indicating that rates as high as 80% generation by PV would be sustainable.
The reality is that it will never reach that point because a balanced portfolio of solar, wind and either geothermal or nuclear and you can meet all needs and power rates will probably fall with periods of free power. But this will require total deregulation of the power market. Honestly at some point in the future power generation will be a commodity service with minor profit margin. I expect that grid maintenance and operation will at some point need to be picked up either by a non-profit or government due to the lack or profit from generation and power rates will fall through the floor. This will be good for everyone. One particular thing I like about wind and PV solar is you don't need to waste water generating power, particularly for those of us that live in the desert.
High temp nuclear and load following (Score:2)
One particular thing I like about wind and PV solar is you don't need to waste water generating power, particularly for those of us that live in the desert.
Molten salt reactors can reach temperatures of 800C making air cooling viable. That means even in a desert the plant can produce power. A typical coal plant can get to 300C, making water cooling necessary for efficient operation. Steam cycle nuclear is similarly constrained.
Not only can molten salt reactors operate without water cooling it can load follow like natural gas turbines. The turbines used for both natural gas and molten salt nuclear are very similar, the difference is how the heat is produced
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This is outright lie. No such demand proxy is needed nor is one deployed. What they've found in Texas where wind and solar are exploding is that wind picks up when solar drops off. There are towns in Texas (easily found by Google) where power prices are free at night because of all the excess wind generation happening at night. As a result there ar
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It would be true if you had only one type of generation in precisely one geographic location, and nowhere else.
Otherwise... no. ;) Just as with the demand side, which has always fluctuated greatly, the generation side relies on statistics to ensure a given level of grid reliability.
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I have nothing against Nuclear but it's cost make it a dead technology.
I have nothing against solar but it's costs make it a dead technology.
Oh, wait, you say that solar power can get cheaper with more research and development? But then so can nuclear, no?
What happens when the cost of solar halves and the cost of nuclear halves? Over time what happens is that the ability for nuclear to operate during the night makes solar very expensive by comparison. Any technology that can store energy from solar panels can also store energy from nuclear power so any leap in energy storag
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Absolutely. Unicorns with rainbows coming out their butts could also someday be real. Possible, yes, likely, not a chance in hell.
One is likely, in fact not just likely but happening. The other has as much chance as the universe popping out of existence tonight.
That is a comp
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While China is building all this solar they are also building nuclear. China currently has 30 operating nuclear reactors, and 24 more under construction. They plan to have 150GWe capacity in nuclear power by 2030.
China figured out how to build nuclear power economically, I suspect that we can as well.
Now, where are my slippers?
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So by 2030 they will have *half* as much capacity in nuclear as they will have in solar by 2020 ?
Not very impressive.
Re: High temp nuclear and load following (Score:2)
Because whether a number is impressive depends on context. A trillion sounds like a big number but a trillion hydrogen atoms is about a trillionth of a gram.
Chinas nuclear investment would be impressive if it stoodby itself but ceases to be so when compared to it solar investment (the topic under discussion). In 15 years it would equal less than half what solar will reach in 5. Thats less than 1/6th the growth rate of solar - not impressive.
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Nuclear has another problem: time.
In all of history not a single nuclear plant has ever been built on-budget or on-time, and currently even the best Nuclear projects have time-frames of 5 to 10 years which in reality ends up at 15 to 20.
You can build solar for the same capacity in 2 years. So over the time it actually takes to build a nuclear plant, you can create ten times that much in solar capacity for a fraction of the cost.
The "space" issue you raise isn't actually an issue at all since solar is almost
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Really?
Can someone tell me what the new chocolate ration is?
It increased to 20 grams, up from 30 grams a month ago!
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That said, the degree to which the 5 year plan, rather than operationally 'private sector'(yes, often heavily state or politician owned in various ways; but they cert
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In Poland we had 5 year plans *every year* during Soviet times. Each year the plan would be better!
Except once we had a 7 year plan, and the teacher made us put little 'siodemki' [7s] on the Christmas tree. This was the great gift of Stalin! [wikipedia.org]
And in spite of planning, you still had to wait in line for three hours to get 300 grams of meat, but perhaps that was the plan....
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Unfortunately the stupidity of Politics / greed would put the kibosh on that but one can always dream / hope that we'll put aside our differences and share our resources one day.
Geothermal is another alternative that is basically ignored.
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Geothermal is fantastic, it's green and very much a favorite of environmentalists - it just isn't available very widely. Where it exists, it's great and a lot of places that have the potential for it and aren't using it really ought to start, but the vast majority of the world is just too geologically unstable for it. There is exactly one active volcano on my entire continent and that's further away from my country than Moscow is from London. There's just no way shipping geothermal from there could compete
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Tesla for all his genius didn't know what we know today. Sure you could use induction to transmit power, but to do it over any significant range you would be producing RF that would have made the communications revolution impossible - and killed a great many people.
We do have some technologies which were developed much later that are essentially the same end-goal but they are very niche in their uses. Microwave power transmission is an example. It works fine for point-to-point line-of-sight transmission whe
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IMHO, it is much safer and more practical to to store solar energy where it is used than to transmit it across the planet. Better still, use it for daytime demand to supplement other sources that power night time demand.
I was just pointing out that world wide wireless power transmi
Re: Uniterrupted solar...Is it possible? (Score:2)
Interestingly it was done at the frequencies he had in mind. Early crystal diode radios often worked without a local power source. An antenna is basically a conductor that gains an electric current from induction from electromagnetic waves. The frequency of the current matches the wave so you can interpret signals from it. Those radios were able to run on just the current from radio wave induction into the antenna. But they were tiny, needed very little power and could only tune AM. You get microcurrents at
You lose less by storing it. (Score:2)
The sun is always shining down on earth somewhere. Is it possible to transmit electricity so that the power is distributed across (most/some of) the planet?
You lose less by storing it nearby rather than shipping it long distances. Storage technology is still improving rapidly, too. Long distance transmission is improving slowly or not much at all, and is unlikely to have a major breakthrough short of discovery of a hot-day-temperature, non-type-A superconductor.
Given that, there's no good reason to get in
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Just curious... how would two-way microwave transmission compare ? Say you beam your excess up to a satelite which beams it down to another country ? I suspect the launch costs alone would be prohibitive and anybody who drives through the beam is going to be pissed... but I'm just curious.
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The world will add 121 gigawatts in the year 2016
I'm sorry, but the predicted number for this year is around sixty to seventy, not a hundred and twenty. Your estimate of the Chinese share in it is therefore quite a bit off.
That's good for exactly 100 trips! (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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The article claims that China will ad 20 GW in 2016.